"I didn't want to create an exhibition about the war in a direct sense," says Ukrainian artist Viktoria Berezina of her solo show "A Face Assembled from Noise," which opens at the Tartu Art Museum on June 20. "This isn't a chronicle of events or a report. It's an attempt to explore what remains inside a person when everything external falls apart."

Like many Ukrainians, when Russia's full-scale invasion began in 2022, Viktoria Berezina's life changed forever. Forced to spend months living under Russian occupation in her hometown Kherson in southern Ukraine, Berezina's email correspondence during that time with Tartu-based gallerist Raul Oreškin struck a strong chord with the Estonian public. A selection of her letters were even read at a protest in front of the Russian Embassy in Tallinn.

In October 2022, Berezina made it out of Ukraine and arrived in Tartu. Two and a half years on, she now considers the city her "safe haven" and Estonia her "new home."

"Life in Tartu, this remarkably creative city, has become a quiet anchor for me. The people, the atmosphere, the sense of inner peace and safety — all of it has given me something I hadn't felt in a long time: warmth."

Deeply personal mission

Since moving to Estonia, Berezina's artistic output has been prolific.

Broadly speaking, she employs two different approaches in her work. "One is connected to contemporary art, where I create collages, graphic works and visual experiments. The other is rooted in traditional Ukrainian decorative painting – Petrykivka – which I rediscovered after moving to Estonia," she explains.

From making over a bus shelter in the South Estonian countryside to creating large-scale murals in Narva and at Art Depoo in Tallinn's hipster Kalamaja district, Berezina has fully embraced the style known in Ukraine as the "art of free people," while also bringing it to new locations and audiences.

So much so, that "some of my friends now jokingly call me 'the ambassador of Petrykivka in Estonia,'" she says "and I take that as a great honor."

After the full-scale war began, Petrykivka became "a lifeline for me," Berezina says – "a thread tying me to my homeland and heritage. It helped me through some truly dark and depressing times. There were days I would sit for hours just painting and, through form, rhythm and color, I felt life flowing back into me."

"When your identity, your language, your symbols, your culture, are under threat, preserving them becomes a deeply personal mission. I can't fully explain it. But I knew that this healing experience was something I needed to share with others."

Speaking without words

"A Face Assembled from Noise" demonstrates another side of Berezina's creative expression, as she works with analogue and digital collage. While differing considerably in form from Petrykivka, collage has equally provided her with "a tool for healing" during such troubled times.

Berezina sees collage as "a path of intuition" and a truly "honest medium." "There's no way to hide. It demands presence and vulnerability. I never know where it will lead, but I trust the process. I don't impose form. I listen, I respond and I follow what resonates."

Berezina created the works for "A Face Assembled from Noise" in 2023, during "a period of profound personal crisis," marked by the effects of war, the loss of her home, and a fractured sense of identity.

"I didn't so much find collage as it found me in a moment of quiet searching, when language no longer felt sufficient to express what was stirring inside me," she explains.

"Collage became a way to speak without words, to explore the intangible through fragments, images and textures. It's the art of assembling wholeness out of what's broken."

For a long time, however, she kept the works to herself – they were simply too personal and painful to share with the world. "They were a visual diary made in silence, not intended for display, but for survival," Berezina says.

"I tore the collages off the canvas, in anger, with hatred, with the urge to destroy. But something inside stopped me. Instead, I hid them and tried to forget they existed."

But as time passed, she came to understand, "that it's precisely through this kind of honest, intimate work that we can build bridges to others. Because war isn't just about external destruction; it's also about the cracks within."

Out of chaos and darkness

"Looking back, I see the transformation I've undergone," says Berezina, as she reflects on the two and a half years since she moved to Estonia.

"There was a time of raw, honest destruction. Now begins the process of healing: fragile, hesitant, like a sprout breaking through asphalt. And within that sprout is the new version of myself," she says.

"I now feel deeply connected to the Estonian sense of restraint and its aesthetic. I'm learning from that rhythm. I'm learning to love the small moments again, learning to simply be, and learning to listen to myself in the silence."

"A Face Assembled from Noise" will always be "a reminder of the darkest period of my life – It's the story of a person who has lost her foundation and is trying to understand who she is now, in the absence of everything that once defined her," Berezina says.

"Many people have seen the works I created after this series – pieces where themes of healing and restoration begin to emerge," Berezina says. "However, to reach those images, the ones that now give me strength, I had to create this series. It became a point of rupture, a threshold from which the journey back to myself began."

As Viktoria Berezina's journey continues, she now also sees the collages she created for "A Face Assembled from Noise" in a different light.

"These works are not about weakness, they are about survival. How, out of chaos and darkness, something alive can be born," Berezina says." And now I'm ready to share that."

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Viktoria Berezina's solo exhibition "A Face Assembled from Noise" opens at Tartu Art Museum (Tartmus) on Saturday, June 21 and will remain on display until September 28. The exhibition is curated by Indrek Grigor.

More information is available here.

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